Here’s one kind of television that Canadians may be doing better than Americans: titillating fantasy with lots of fights, stylized sets and people in monster makeup. The show that offers this kind of wildness isLost Girl, the story of a beautiful succubus (Anna Silk) solving supernatural mysteries that is completing its third season on Showcase and has just been picked up for a fourth. It’s been one of the Canadian channel’s highest-rated shows since it began in 2010, consistently winning its time slot on the Syfy network in the U.S. And instead of a serious genre show, it’s what writer and current showrunner Emily Andras calls “a world of mermaids and werewolves and sex manatees.”

Executive producer Jay Firestone says he started developing the show several years ago when friends pointed out that TV had nothing like Buffy the Vampire Slayeranymore. When he set out with writer-creator Michelle Lovretta to change that, he found that a lot of networks thought the idea of a girl-power fantasy show was “old news. I got one network executive telling me the show was too much like Witchblade, a show that didn’t last.”

Networks wouldn’t have been so dismissive of this kind of show in the ’90s, when the first-run syndication market and a proliferation of cable networks created a demand for low-budget action shows that made up with humour what they lacked in money: Buffy and Xena: Warrior Princess were two of the most popular. But in today’s TV world, science fiction tends to be quite dark and serious, likeBattlestar Galactica. “A lot of incredible genre stuff is quite earnest right now,” Andras says, and even shows that could be campy, like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones, are basically solemn.

While Lost Girl has its serious moments, it is openly campy in a way that modern television doesn’t usually dare to be, starting with the heroine’s power to project an irresistible sexual aura and suck the life out of people with a kiss. The show abounds in references to B movies and cheesy action shows; Firestone singles out an episode where “we did the POV of a spider on a shower rod jumping down at somebody,” and speaks of the heroine’s “MacGyver-type” ability to find makeshift weapons in fight scenes. But instead of being attacked by critics for its cheesiness, it’s earned praise from them, including a rave review from the Huffington Post that helped give it more prominence in the U.S., even as the plots were getting more outlandish. The third season opened with a women-in-prison story which Andras describes as “incredibly winky-winky, going back to the original Caged Heat,” and in which the prison was run by man-hating Amazons. We probably won’t see that on The Walking Dead.

Lost Girl may be a throwback to that earlier type of TV in another way: it uses its silliness as a way of taking on issues without preaching. Just as Buffy was one of the first shows of its era to deal with gay characters matter-of-factly, Lost Girl has become popular for its non-judgmental depiction of the lead character’s bisexuality. Andras says the show’s refusal to label people has attracted “two fan bases: genre people and the LGBT community.” The triangle between the heroine, a female doctor and a handsome wolf man is also an excuse to feature skimpy outfits and what Andras calls “hot ladies doing hot lady stuff,” but in the tradition of the B movies the show is paying homage to, it goes to places respectable shows haven’t gone yet.

If anything is standing in the way of Lost Girl getting more attention, it may be a rival on HBO. True Blood, another sexy show about monsters, premiered earlier, though Tara Ellis, Showcase’s senior director of drama content, points out that “we had been developing this show long before True Blood came out.” In any case, now that True Blood is struggling to find its way after losing two showrunners, Lost Girl may have a chance to get noticed as a leader in sex-drenched fantasy—though Andras says the writers are careful about not doing titillation for its own sake: “The sex has to be part of the story, or serve a purpose.” But, she adds, “you can’t stop a group of college guys from watching it at 3 a.m.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/buffys-sultry-canadian-cousin/feed/5Is this Canada’s finest achievement ever?http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/is-this-canadas-finest-achievement-ever/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/is-this-canadas-finest-achievement-ever/#commentsTue, 19 Feb 2013 20:40:01 +0000Jaime Weinmanhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=352461There’s nothing quite as inspiring as finding a cheesy sitcom intro that you had never seen before. Okay, there are maybe one or two things more inspiring, but still, this…

There’s nothing quite as inspiring as finding a cheesy sitcom intro that you had never seen before. Okay, there are maybe one or two things more inspiring, but still, this warmed my heart. It’s a Canadian (CTV) sitcom from 1988 called “Learning the Ropes,” a combination of two things that were popular in TV – cheesy syndicated family sitcoms and professional wrestling. I would describe the premise, but it has an opening narration that does it for us. And this opening narration, done by an announcer whose voice I recognize but whose name I don’t know, is followed by a whole synth-accompanied inspirational theme song. And it ends with a clip of hugging. And the hero, played by the late Lyle Alzado, is a professional wrestler and the vice principal at a school and a single dad to two teenagers, making it like three sitcoms in one. And the theme song attempts to rhyme “rule” and “possible.” And it features a young Yannick Bisson and Stephanie from Degrassi Junior High. So while I’m not saying that this is the greatest thing Canada has ever done, it certainly suggests that we could hold our head up high in the schlocky ’80s sitcom world.

The proposal, which came as a shock to network executives Friday, would require CTV, Global, CITY-TV and others to spend the same amount on Canadian programming as they do on U.S. shows. For every $1 spent on programs from outside the country, a dollar would have to be spent at home creating a domestic show…

There are concerns in Ottawa that runaway spending to lock up U.S. shows that do well in the race for ratings is now contributing to network television’s financial woes in Canada.

Read the rest of the article, and also the comments. One thing to note is that even after the bidding wars of recent years, the gap between the money spent on U.S. product and Canadian product is not huge, and equalizing the spending would just bring us back to the situation of five years ago:

Since 2003, CTV and Global have escalated the amount they spend on foreign shows in an effort to steal audiences from each other. Though numbers are not broken out by network, back then the commercial networks spent $541-million on foreign programs, and $536-million on Canadian ones.

Last year, spending on foreign shows hit a record $775-million, compared with $619-million to make domestic programs. The numbers include several commercial networks; CTV, Global, CITY-TV, and French networks such as TVA. Public broadcaster CBC is not included.

I really don’t know what to say about this idea; I’m skeptical of the idea that better Canadian programming will happen just because the CRTC demands more of it, but I have no great sympathy for the broadcasters, whose bidding wars over U.S. shows basically amount to a war over the right to deprive us of the superior U.S. feeds. (I’m always happy when there is no Canadian simulcast and I can see the original network commercials and bumpers. They’re supposed to be part of the viewing experience.)